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Raymond heard the voice behind him, realized that it wasn’t John Lee come to back him up. He whirled and fired almost in the same motion. The dark figure in the hallway dropped to the floor. When Raymond turned back, DeWayne was gone.

DeWayne didn’t know who the voice from the hallway belonged to, and he was too terrified to care. When the big Indian turned away and fired, he hurled himself towards the kitchen. He scooped his own gun off the kitchen table as he passed. He fumbled with the door, almost sobbing with frustration as his fear-numbed fingers refused to work. Finally, he was able to yank the door open and stumble into the back yard.

The tiny back yard was overgrown with weeds. A rusting metal shed, barely six feet tall, sagged in one corner. DeWayne ran towards it, hoping to hide out inside. He yanked at the shed door. It was padlocked. Behind him, the kitchen door slammed open. DeWayne shrieked in panic and fired blindly back towards the sound. Glass shattered in the window. The figure silhouetted in the doorway didn’t fall, but it did pull back.

As the man in the living room had turned, Keller had instinctively dropped and sought cover. The only thing to get behind was to be the body of the man from the doorway. Now Keller lay full length on the floor, trying not to look at the eyes of the dead man. The body was close enough to touch. There was a sticky wetness under him and the familiar sharp metallic smell of blood. Keller realized that he was lying in a huge smear of it where the man had tried to drag himself down the hallway, his life flowing out of him and onto the floorboards. There was too much blood gone for any man to survive. Keller looked into the man’s eyes. Those eyes were becoming more inanimate with each passing second. The man had lost the strength to scream. At first Keller thought that a blessing, but the pitiful sight of the man’s mouth moving, trying to form words was worse. Finally a word came out, expelled like a sob on the man’s dying breath.

“Who...?”Keller didn’t see any need to answer. There was no one left to hear. Keller heard faraway sirens drawing closer. Someone had called the cops. There was a shot from outside, then the sound of glass shattering. Someone swore from inside the kitchen.

Keller took stock of the situation. Behind him were the cops. Before him, there were two men with guns. He wasn’t sure where they were. For that matter, he wasn’t completely sure who they were.

“Fuck this,” he said out loud. He started backing down the hallway, sliding on his belly, the shotgun held out in front of him.

He felt a sudden touch of metal on the back of his neck. “Stop there,” a voice said in a soft Spanish accent.

“We didn’t mean to kill him,” DeWayne called out. “I swear it, man. We didn’t know he was carrying a gun.”

The figure behind the door made no answer. DeWayne crouched deeper in the shadows beside the shed. “You can even have the money back, man, it’s in the bag in the hallway. Just let me go get some help for my cousin.”

“Your cousin’s dead,” came the voice from inside the house. “I kilt him.”

DeWayne put a hand to his forehead. “Okay, man,” he said. “Okay. So we’re, like, even, right? An eye for an eye?” There was no answer.

His eyes were more accustomed to the darkness now. There was a chest-high chain link fence at the back of the lot, where the yard of the house behind backed up to this one. He began edging his way back, then leaped up and turned towards the fence. He threw one leg onto a narrow metal tube running along the top of the fence and tried to vault over. The metal tube collapsed under his weight. He landed atop the points of the chain link. DeWayne screamed as the crudely twisted ends of wire gouged him. He dropped the gun. The Indian came running out, firing on the run. The muzzle flash of his pistol lit up the yard. DeWayne rolled off the fence and the bullets passed over him. DeWayne sobbed in fear and rage as he scrambled to his knees. His hand closed over something hard and metallic.